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(Constructive 


(odernism 


POSITIVE FACTORS in the SANEST and 
STRONGEST SPIRITUAL MOVEMENT 
of the CHRISTIAN ERA. 


ne 


Lo wrenee YY, ive 


BANNER PRESS 
PRINTERS -:- PUBLISHERS 
EMORY UNIVERSITY, GA. 


Copyright 1926 by Lawrence W. Neff 
All rights reserved. 


FOREWORD 


N THIS brief treatise no effort whatso- 

ever has been made to effect alignment 
with any specific school of thought or group 
of propagandists, for reasons stated. Nor is 
it deemed needful perspicuously to define 
“Modernism,” which, in so far as it possesses 
abiding import, will be “Ancientism” a thou- 
sand years from now, without, however, hav- 
ing suffered any abatement of its native viril- 
ity. Its present importance consists in the fact 
that for the first time since the process of slow 
strangulation was applied in the supposed in- 
terest of an authoritative Church and priest- 
hood, earnest men in ever-increasing numbers 
are highly resolved to rediscover and recover 
the actual principles of Jesus Christ and give 
them their first adequate test as the solvent of 
social, political and economic problems now be- 
coming hazardous to civilization itself, in the 
meeting or avoidance of which problems the 
conservative and inspirational resources of con- 
ventional religion are suffering obvious col- 
lapse. The alternative appears to be Modern- 
ism or Nihilism. 





UPROOTING 
ano 


REPLANTING 





I 


N ITS essence Modernism is the most 
iL primitive of all the purer forms of religious 
faith, resting as it does upon the data of per- 
sonal experience. Its distinctive concept is 
that of direct access to God, without resort to 
mechanical, sacrificial or sacerdotal expedients. 
Originally it represented the intuitive quest of 
the reverent spirit for an unseen but all per- 
vading Power, with which some sort of com- 
munion was felt to be established. This is 
best delineated in the earlier portions of the 
Old Testament narratives, and marks the gen- 
esis of spiritual development along experimen- 
tal lines. In recurring phases it is recognizable 
in the turning from outward sanctions and 
constraints to inward impulsions; the protest 
of luminous souls against the irksome bond- 
age of externals; the ascendency of ideals liv- 
ing and growing over formularies dead and 
dying. Latterly it may be taken to denote 
the repudiation of constituted authority merely 
as such in behalf of deepened devotion to 
facts and principles which appear to afford 


clearer insight into the ultimate meaning of 


Seven 


Constructive Modernism 


life and destiny. For these reasons Modern- 
ism has ever been manifest less as a form than 
a force, and properly culminates not so much 
in a fixed system as a perennial forward-urge. 


Thus viewed, the illustrious succession of 
Modernists is as ancient as the recorded an- 
nals of the race, for the reason that in the 
realm of religion, from the beginning even to 
the present time, they have done just about 
all the thinking and writing that was worthy 
of preservation, save as musty memoirs. Omit- 
ting individual examples we may mention col- 
lectively the Hebrew partiarchs and prophets, 
in contrast with their pagan and priestly con- 
temporaries; the Founder of Christianity, re- 
lentlessly hounded and crucified by the rigidly 
righteous as the arch-enemy of the true faith; 
the leaders of every great moral and spiritual 
—as contrasted with ecclesiastical—crusade 
of the Christian era,—each and all of them 
rightly regarded as inimical to the established 
order, which forthwith proceeded to crush 
them to the utmost extent of its ability. 


Nor is there substantial ground for mistak- 
ing the radical and even revolutionary charac- 
ter of the incipient movement in its present 
manifestation. Standing self-convicted of re- 
jecting perhaps half the stereotyped tenets of 


Eight 


Uprooting and Replanting 


conventional orthodoxy, it adds the yet greater 
offense of asserting and emphasizing the other 
half with most objectionable insistence. Its 
moral ultimata will come with as much of 
dynamic (cf. dynamite) to the respectable 
orthodoxy of our day as the utterances of 
Jesus fell upon the dulled ears of his com- 
placent contemporaries. Now, even as then, 
the unfamiliar truth will become a stumbling- 
block to multitudes of earnest but misguided 
souls who, by their traditions, have made the 
word of God of none effect. 


For the upspringing of a firmer faith there 
must first be a wholesale uprooting of errors 
and half-truths. This sign is set for the falling 
and the rising up again of many, and illus- 
trates forcefully the fact that truth itself is 
the savor of life or death according to the 
constitution of the mind which perceives it. 
Jesus himself overturned the unstable faith of a 
larger number of individuals than any other 
has ever done. But there has been many 
centuries of preparation for this return to vital 
as contrasted with formal fundamentals, and 
the prediction may be confidently made that 
after the tumult and the shouting dies—or 
even as it is in progress—there will be a quiet, 
almost imperceptible and altogether irresisti- 


Nine 


Constructive Modernism 


ble return to the truths which are stirring 
anew the heart of humanity. 


Modernism in its present status is largely 
unsystematized and utterly unorganized. These 
facts sufficiently attest its spontaneous char- 
acter. In many and widely scattered fields it is 
springing up blade by blade, as at the approach 
of spring, with the far fruition of the harvest 
season hidden from finite vision. Perhaps the 
movement will long remain predominantly 
spontaneous and unorganized, in which event 
it will afford another interesting and instruc- 
tive parallel to the Christianity of Jesus Christ, — 
which strikingly magnified the potencies of 
germination and minified the routine of organ- 
ization—only to have the process reversed and 
the perversion perpetuated by his immediate 
followers, to whose mistakes the Acts and 
Epistles bear abundant testimony. 


As a return to vital sources, Modernism | 
may be confidently counted upon to propa- 
gate major principles of growth and relegate 
minor rules of conduct. | 


The reproach that Modernists as a group do 
not maintain close formation is more than half 
praise. Meticulous consistency is a character- 
istic vice of small minds operating in narrow 
compass. The men who have teen at grips 


Ten 


Uprooting and Replanting 


with great and portentous truths which will 
powerfully affect the whole future of human- 
ity have not as yet taken the time or trouble 
to be conspicuously consistent among them- 
selves. Nor did the writers of the narratives 
which constitute our Bible. Consistency is still 
well able to take thought of itself and to dis: 
pense with cajolery. 


Certainly there is no such circumstantial 
agreement among Modernists as to lend coun- 
tenance to the oft-heard charge of a dark con- 
spiracy. In fact, one is led to suspect that they 
are not even keeping prudent watch upon one 
another. By way of personal confession, I 
read an average of scarcely one heretical vol- 
ume in half a dozen years, and give no more 
than casual notice to any one of the so-called 
liberal periodicals of the day. The spirit of 
the time is of significance only as it is related 
to the spirit of the timeless. Interest attaches 
more properly and more profoundly to the 
slow but perceptible and inevitable maturing 
of divinely implanted truths than to the pe- 
culiarities of this or that particular specimen, 
whether peradventure wheat or tare. 


For me the sowing-time extended through 
more than a decade, beginning and concluding 
with the reading of a wide variety of books 


Eleven 


Constructive Modernism 


on religious subjects; embracing also a period 
of years devoted to the intensive study of tech- 
nical theology under instructors of unques- 
tionable ability and character, some of them 
then and afterward under mild suspicion of 
heresy. With a distinctly scriptural back- 
ground acquired in an early environment of 
the traditional type and something of the sci- 
entific spirit which comes of peering through 
the microscope to observe the sequence of phys- 
ical phenomena, I have been content for some 
years past to let the seed-truths spring up and 
grow night and day, I knew not how, bring- 
ing forth fruit according to laws of the spir- 
itual harvest. 


Very similar to my own has been the ex- 


perience of a multitude of others who have 


made the quest of God their controlling in- 
centive. Confidence in the outcome is height- 
ened for me by the consideration that during 
nearly twenty years of rather intimate asso- 
ciation with students preparing for the minis- 
try I have scarcely known one of more than 
mediocre ability who failed to develop either 
marked sympathy or a measure of enthusiasm 
for the tenets of Modernism, as was virtually 


inevitable. A few I have known to take alarm | 


as soon as they felt the leaven working within 


Twelve 


Uprooting and Replanting 


their minds, resulting in their speedy departure 
and sensational tales that infidelity was being 
taught. One prudent father of my acquaint- 
ance succeeded in persuading his son to enter 
the active ministry immediately upon com- 
pleting the regular college courses, expressing 
a deep repugnance for modern ideas of relig- 
ion and thereby leaving the young man utter- 
ly unfitted to deal with them intelligently or 
effectually. Just here is much or most of the 
significance of what is termed the revolt 
of youth, refusing to run from every bogie 
conjured up in its behalf, and alas! the source 
of much or most of the irreligion which has , 
resulted from an honest but purely supereroga- 
tory choice between new facts and old falla- 
cies. 


It would be not impossible, perhaps even 
not difficult, to enumerate the fundamental 
principles of constructive Modernism in a doz- 
en or a score of concise statements bearing a 
general resemblance to the planks of a political 
platform, but I resist the temptation at pres- 
ent in the hope of clarifying and enforcing 
them as they arise in the course of orderly 
discussion, possibly to be epitomized at its 
conclusion. 


Thirteen 





THE REQUIREMENT 
ORR EALTIEY: 





II 


NE OF THE TW0O inexorable de- 
O mands which constructive Modernism 
makes upon the prevalent systems of religious 
thought is that of rigorous reality, as con- 
trasted with specious superstition, gushing gen- 
erality or metaphysical meandering. The very 
first essential of wholesome religion is reality, 
whereas the peculiar and characteristic curse 
of tortuous theology has ever been unreality. 
Obscured in some measure by the dust of 
current controversy, this fact becomes obvious 
in the long perspective of history, from the 
time when fanatical partisans flayed each other 
figuratively and literally over an iota subscript, 
indulged in the intellectual gymnastics of 
scholasticism, presently pounded each other to 
pulp over the mode of baptism and otherwise 
proved their religion orthodox by apostolic 
blows and knocks. 


Then end is not yet. My outstanding im- 
pression of the preaching of the last thirty- 
odd years is that of inapplicability to immedi- 
ate conditions. In the earlier portion of the 
period mentioned the staples of discussion were 
the devious deductions of dogmatic theology 
based for the greater part upon such passages 
as are found in the earlier chapters of St. 
Paul’s epistle to the Romans, issuing in the 


Seventeen 


Constructive Modernism 


amplification and alleged elucidation of themes 
entirely orthodox but dead as Adam’s brindle 
ox. Regularly, once a year, during the revival 
season, the preacher descended to the level of 
ordinary comprehension, resorted to exhorta- 
tions and ’rousements, enabling him to report 
a substantial ingathering of members. At the 
present time in this section of the country it 
is all but impossible to find a mature man or 
woman who professed conversion or joined the 
church outside of dog-days. With myself it 
was midsummer campmeeting time, between 
laying-by and fodder-pulling, after the strait- 
est dictates of orthodoxy. 


This was and is the fault of antecedents 
rather than of the particular individual or 
group. Ministerial acceptability then as now 
resided largely, if not chiefly, in the knack of 
imparting an impression of profundity by dex- 
trous manipulation of high-sounding phrases, 
buttressing belligerent orthodoxy with ostensi- 
bly conclusive scriptural citations and play- 
ing upon the erotic emotions with a fine fren- 
zy of impassioned oratory. One of the’ most 
melancholy and far from infrequent specta- 
cles is that of the eloquent preacher who fails 
to get his bottled eloquence successfully un- 
corked and emits a sermonic fizzle. Needless 


Eighteen 


The Requirement of Reality 


to remark, the profundity rings hollowly, the 
ostensible orthodoxy often bespeaks intellec- 
tual indolence and the lachrymose ebullitions 
are home-brewed. Such alleged preaching, 
once generic, now has its habitat chiefly in the 
South, with steadily diminishing influence. 
May it diminish increasingly, unless, as one is 
led to fear, its place is to be taken by the 
esthetic essays, political polemics and sociologi- 
cal soliloquizings which pass for preaching in 
some other sections. Either way, most ser- 
mons nowadays tend undeviatingly to dullness, 
and it would appear about equally difficult 
one place or another to be reasonably assured 
of hearing a deliverance which might be ex- 
pected to impart a ripple of intellectual im- 
pact, produce a sense of spiritual elevation and 
fortify moral resolution. 


Upon the psychological and ethical reaction 
of the minister, more often than otherwise a 
man of lofty motives, it is painful to dwell. 
Normally the stress may be expected to issue 
in the type of professionalism which makes 
this vocation one of the least religious. There 
is occasion for misgiving and depression in 
the candid and confidential way in which eld- 
erly ministers sometimes speak of the lost 
radiance of their earlier career, and very often 


Nineteen 


Constructive Modernism 


their silence itself is more revealing than 
_ speech. Aiming always at regularity—‘track- 
ing the track,” as one of them phrased it in 
my hearing—repeating platitudes, pushing pre- 
scribed programs, threshing out the theological 
straw whose dust has about suffocated spir- 
ituality, fostering feeble faith which was never 
robust enough to doubt, administering sooth- 
ing syrup instead of iron tonic,— these are ex- 
ceedingly poor substitutes for proclaiming 
eternal spiritual verities that make men wise 
unto salvation. 


In sharp contrast with this debilitating 
course of procedure is the quiet, courageous 
and properly reverent quest of truth that 
marks the better manifestation of the spirit of 
our own time, which is rightly associated with 
and under weighty obligation to research in 
the natural sciences, whose subject matter is 
the handiwork of God himself. The very 
willingness to follow any assured or predomi- 
nantly probable clue to its ultimate ascertain- 
able source and culmination is an evidence and 
actual form of faith in the natural or super- 
natural order more: meritorious than mere 
blind credulity. If it were indeed necessary, 
as some of the deluded devotees of decadent 
orthodoxy have so vociferously affirmed, to 


Twenty 


The Requirement of Reality 


make definite choice between the two methods 
of approach to truth, we should hardly be dis- 
posed to lament for the feeble hearts and lame 
brains incidentally lost to the cause of ad- 
vancement. 


Modernism lives in the realm of reality and 
breathes the pure atmosphere of veracity. It 
offers hospitality to any and all truth from any 
and all sources, and makes emphatic denial of 
the premise that under any condition conceiv- 
able or inconceivable one positive truth can in 
any particular contradict, though it may su- 
persede and displace, another. For it every 
ascertained facts stands as a landmark upon 
the eternal thoroughfare of progress, and the 
timorous throwing of a mantle of concealment 
over it effects nothing else than the contriving 
of a perilous stumbling-stone. 


Modernism fully shares, and actually antic- 
ipated, the conviction which is now making 
a quick and thorough conquest of scientific 
thought that the ground of the universe is 
spiritual rather than material, as so long as- 
sumed and blatantly asserted. The supposedly 
inert, unoriginated and indestructible stuff 
which is the staple of science has been chased 
in nympholeptic leaps from planet to sun, from 
sun to system, thence to constellation, cosmos 


Twenty-one 


Constructive Modernism 


and macrocosmos; in the opposite direction 
through all the successive mazes of molecule, 
atom, ion, electron and microcosmic surmise 
to the infinite and eternal energy from which 
all things proceed, endowed with obvious in- 
telligence, which inevitably means—God. The 
undevout scientist of today, having first or- 
phaned himself, is at the point of losing all 
his remaining family. 

If, in such spiritual setting, the proper and 
scientific study of mankind is man, assuredly 
the fact of paramount interest and importance 
concerning him must needs be a spiritual fact, 
which is both the luminous conception of Jesus 
and the logical contention of Christianity. It 
follows that a radical change to true corre- 
spondence with the spiritual environment is 
the consummate experience, and this means 
exactly—conversion. Although there are as 
many and reliable data concerning this spirit- 
ual rebirth as can be marshalled in any field 
of research, be it said to the everlasting shame 
of obsolescent science that it has ineptly ig- 
nored or openly sneered at spiritual phenomena 
just as verifiable and now becoming recognized 
as immeasurably more significant than the most 
familiar physical phases, thereby both stultify- 
ing and discrediting itself and entailing the 


Twenty-two 


The Requirement of Reality 


penalty of unscientific bias. Yet every decade 
has produced men who were at once scientific 
specialists and spiritual seers, and their tribe 
steadily increases. In particular, the new psy- 
chology is emerging as a notable ally of the 
new theology. 


For the sake of final consistency, if for no 
other reason, constructive Modernism must in- 
creasingly emphasize spiritual values, which 
implies simply the utmost importance of re- 
ligion and the utter impotence of mere nega- 
tion. New and hidden meanings emerge from 
the pungent and solemn query, “What shal] 
a man be profited if he gain the whole world 
and lose his own life?” With this stupendous 
conviction at heart, its votary becomes as the 
man finding treasure hid in a field, and for 
joy thereof, going and selling all he has to 
procure it; or the merchantman seeking goodly 
pearls, and finding one of great price, surren- 
dering all other possesions to make it his own. 
Traditionalism, on the other hand, caught a 
glimpse of the treasure and hastily departed 
to publish the fact abroad, afterward returning 
to find it vanished and its own latter state 
worse than the former. Not more, but vastly 
less, of consequence attaches to discovery of 
spiritual truth than to what one subsequently 


Twenty-three 


Constructive Modernism 


does about it. The age-long and inescapable 
indictment of organized religion is wrenched 
emphasis of values. 


Modernism in its better manifestations is 
simply Traditionalism that has awakened from 
its troubled slumber at the touch of reality, 
and has set itself, a bit feverishly it may be, 
to the task of working out at one and the same 
time a life and a philosophy of life which are 
worthy our magnificent opportunity as fellow- 
workers with God in a redemptive program of 
illimitable outreach. 

The ground of confidence in such truth as 
it has apprehended, and the only assured hope 
of continued progress, is found in the assump- 
tion and assertion that the human reason has 
an inherent affinity for and pre-adaptation to 
truth, much as the lungs and other physical 
organs exhibit unique prenatal fitness for their 
several functions. All these forms of activity 
persist as mere potentialities until, in the ful- 
ness of time, they are pushed forward by an 
invisible urge, which seems to say, “Breathe or 
suffocate. Think or forfeit the power of 
thought.” All alike are developed and disci- 
plined by proper use, and alike become more 
fit through right functioning. We steadfastly 
affirm that the conscious human personality is 


Twenty-four 


The Requirement of Reality 


not the waif of chance, marooned upon some 
remote and uncharted shoal of the cosmos to 
wander in hopeless bewilderment through 
deepening darkness to ultimate unmerciful dis- 
aster; but that instead it is a legitimate off- 
spring of the Infinite, heir of a glorious in- 
heritance, at home in one of its Father’s many 
mansions, amid an environment infinitely fa- 
vorable to normal and progressive develop- 
ment, entrusted even now with powers and 
potencies hazardous far beyond the danger- 
point if misdirected and yet beneficently pro- 
phetic of the eventual attainment of godlike at- 
tributes that overreach reason and consign 
even the most opulent imagination to the 
poorhouse. 


Twenty-five 


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THE REQUIREMENT 
OF RIGHTNESS 





Il 


OT LESS notable than the intellectual 
quickening since the advent of the sci- 
entific method of investigating truth 

has been the moral and spiritual rebirth under 
the practical though pitiably inadequate appli- 
cation in all social relationships of the hu- 
manistic principles of liberty, fraternity, equal- 
ity. This has wrought in effect the resurgence 
of virile Christianity, and gains rather than 
loses impressiveness by reason of the fact that 
it emerged most definitely from the lawless- 
ness and bloodshed and militant disbelief which 
immediately preceded, attended and followed 
the cataclysm we term the French Revolution. 
Not less significantly, in its subsequent stages 
it has prevailed largely outside the fold of .or- 
ganized religion and very often in hostility to 
it. There is grave reason to fear that a mis- 
taken zeal to avoid the very appearance of 
evil in this guise may have impelled the Church 
to embrace and hug to its bosom the reality 
thereof. 


When the human personality has become 
possessed of the passion for justice and right- 
eousness it is worse than folly to say, “Thus 
far shalt thou go, and no farther.” The only 
alternative to freedom of intellectual inquiry 
and supremacy of the moral consciousness is 


Twenty-nine 


Constructive Modernism 


the bald denial of any place to either and 
both. Herein the Roman Catholic Church 
alone is consistent, and it is not surprising that 
in the quest of spiritual tranquillity many 
eminent men have been driven to commit both 
their intellect and conscience to its sovereign 
custody. 


When Martin Luther entered upon his 
spectacular career he lifted the lid from Pan- 
dora’s box and smashed it to splinters. Along 
with the resultant moral revulsion at the satur- 
nalia of licentiousness and covetousness per- 
petrated and condoned by the papal regime, 
and logically consequent upon it, was the 
inference of individual freedom in interpret- 
ing the scriptures—a prerogative previously 
monopolized by a chosen few theologians under 
the tutelage and imprimatur of Holy Church. 
That Luther could not always constrain cer- 
tain other men equally educated and equally 
conscientious to agree with all his interpreta- 
tions is not in the least surprising. At any 
rate he may be written down as the outstand- 
ing forerunner of Modernism, and very few 
Roman Catholics will be found questioning his 
clear claim to the distinction. But he signally 
failed to free himself and his following from 
the consummate doctrinal curse of Christianity, 


Thrity 


The Requirement of Rightness 


inherited from Paul and Augustine, which 
task fell to succeeding generations. 


John Wesley prided himself upon the scrip- 
turalness of his teachings, but in asserting and 
emphasizing the freedom of the human will 
and repudiating the monstrous doctrines of 
election, predestination, foreordination, he 
went directly counter to the weight of scrip- 
tural authority outside the utterances of Jesus 
himself as recorded in the first three gospels. 
The plain man who reads the famous passages 
in the writings of St. Paul, ranking theologian 
of Christianity, cannot escape the conclusion 
that he held tenaciously to these tenets, how- 
ever much he tended to abrogate them in 
preaching an unlimited atonement; likewise 
there appears to be little if any question upon 
the point among the scholars who are most 
familiar with the documents in the original 
language. Yet their major premise is an odious 
insult to the conscience, degrading God to the 
moral plane of the human father who would 
bring children into involuntary existence, cast 
them off cruelly to struggle against impossible 
odds, force them into careers of crime and 
then devote all his energies to sending them to 
the gallows. Rigid Calvinism thus dispenses 
with the Devil by putting God in his place. 


Thirty-one 


Constructive Modernism 


Dr. Samuel Johnson, contemporary of Wesley, 
declared that commonsense never made any 
man believe it, and now we may add that a 
sense of common justice and even decency 
is enough to make any right-minded man in- 
stantly and indignantly reject it, however scrip- 
tural. Thirty years ago in the far west I heard 
the question debated by two ministers, Meth- 
odist and Baptist, and the thrill of an utterance 
quoted, though disapprovingly, by the former 
has never wholly passed from me: “I beg 
leave to differ with St. Paul.” At the time 
it startled and even shocked me, but my sus- 
ceptibility to shock has considerably dimin- 
ished. At present it appears that only two 
Protestant denominations of repute in the 
United States even nominally hold to predes- 
tination, all others having expressly repudiated 
it. These two operate exclusively in the South, 
and representative men of both communions 
declare that even here the doctrine is virtually 
abandoned. 


In the same class of rejected teachings we 
may mention a few of many—such as literal, 
inerrant and equal inspiration of each and ew 
ery part of the sixty-six books constituting the 
Bible; innate depravity of mankind; a legal or 
mechanistic plan of salvation from eternal pun- 


Thirty-two 


The Requirement of Rightness 


ishment; imputed guilt or innocence; various 
penal and substitutional theories of atonement 
—with any and all other hypotheses which do 
violence to moral sanctions and make salvation 
a quibble or dodge rather than the imparta- 
tion and nuture of the divine life. For myself, 
the deliberate decision was reached long years 
ago, and is since intensified rather than abated, 
to make the crucial test of any teaching its 
conformity or disconformity to the prompt- 
ings of a conscience unreservedly committed to 
follow divine guidance. Nor could conscience 
continue to function truly upon any other con- 
dition. 

The present pitiable plight of the Church, in 
the eyes of thoughtful and earnest observers, 
has arisen directly from a settled disposition 
to compromise as between conscience and ex- 
pediency. Fearful of requiring any radical de- 
parture from conventional attitudes and prac- 
tices, thereby subjecting its claim of super- 
natural endowment to a definite test, it has 
chosen rather to lower its moral and spiritual 
standards to unobjectionable levels, “putting 
the bars so low anybody can jump over them,” 
as the revivalists phrase it. By consenting to 
make itself conformable it has effectually for- 
feited its powers to transform. Purposing to 


Thirty-three 


Constructive Modernism 


become inclusive, it is only thoroughly incon- 
clusive. Never before in the annals of Chris- 
tianity were so many persons so well disposed 
to indorse Jesus Christ or so ill disposed to 
follow him. Never were there so many who 
said “Yes” with their lips and “No” with their 
lives. Never were so many of the same mem- 
bers in good standing in both the Church and 
the penitentiary, despite their uncanny clever- 
ness in evading the latter. Organized religion 
never had more of fuss or less of force than 
at the present time. 

Modernism increasingly rejects and repudi- 
ates the type of engrafted piety which brings 
forth upon its various branches all manner of 
fruit, good and evil. In its contemplation the 
spiritual laws which are revealed as subsisting 
in our relationships to God—no less real and 
operative than those which hold planets in their 
ordered orbits—are the patterns of lesser laws 
which pervade with beneficent sway every re- 
lationship of man to man, whether political, 
economic, social, or other; and no access or ex- 
cess of fervor in hymns and prayers wafted 
heavenward can suffice for the lack of common 
honesty and humane liberality exercised earth- 
ward. The pull of the Golden Rule is deemed 


Thirty-four 


The Requirement of Rightness 


ultimately as inescapable as the pull of gravi- 
tation. 

As in the former dilemma relating to the 
reliability or unreliability of the human rea- 
son, we reach the analogous conclusion that 
while the conscience is primarily a mere bundle 
of potencies awaiting development and direc- 
tion, eventually it becomes the sole and sufh- 
cient arbiter of spiritual values for the indi- 
vidual. Apart from its monitions one may 
formally assent to or dissent from any moral 
proposition, but such act is extraneous and has 
no other effect than to produce confusion 
worse confounded. Upon the particular point 
this position is in essential accord with the 
teaching of the Quakers concerning the “in- 
ner light,” and the remark is heard with in- 
creasingly frequency that this group is more 
nearly than any other representative of the re- 
ligion of the future. 

Illuminism is based upon the hypothesis, 
substantiated to the complete satisfaction of 
many, including myself, that conscience is be- 
stowed by the Creator, possessing inherent af- 
finity and pre-adaption for perceiving moral 
verities no less naturally than the bodily organs 
function and the reason operates in its proper 
sphere. Very similarly conscience is first man- 


Thirty-five 


Constructive Modernism 


ifested through potencies, pushed forward by 
an invisible force, increasingly directed by 
free personality toward right or wrong devel- 
opment, which former result is worth the 
whole soul’s tasking and which latter is trag- 
edy unspeakable. It follows that in the func- 
tioning of conscience idle curiosity is an in- 
sult and indifference a crime. Acute sensi- 
bility to good and evil corresponds to the 
fluctuations of a delicate instrument for meas- 
urement of weight, space or time, and is 
equally amenable to abuse and deterioration. 
In daily affairs of life it is the one unfailing 
monitor, and in the form of profound convic- 
tions of right and wrong provides the real 
groundwork of practical religion, quite apart 
from creed. It is a bit surprising how religi- 
ously many persons live with atrocious theo- 
logical dogmas, which phenomenon bears tes- 
timony to the fact that moral verities are self- 
attesting and normally dominant. 

These and many other considerations war- 
rant the inference, which Modernism frankly 
accepts and confidently asserts in contravention 
of Traditionalism, that mankind is not fallen 
but ascending—not disallowed or disinherited 
of God, but slowly and painfully led onward, 
with many stumblings and backslidings, into 


Thirty-six 


The Requirement of Rightness 


the glorious liberty of perfect sonship. It af- 
firms that religion, being innate, will grow up 
naturally in the heart if it is not crushed into 
deformity, in which event it will continue to 
grow unnaturally; that the religion of Jesus 
Christ, given to help lift a rising race, im- 
presses no alien influence upon human nature, 
but instead supplements its normal powers, be- 
ing ideally adapted thereto and perfectly ar- 
ticulated therewith; that the habitual attitude 
and individual act of reverent obedience opens 
the windows of the soul just as surely as dis- 
obedience closes them; that the heaven within 
and the heaven yet to be are alike dependent 
upon right relationship to salutary environ- 
ment, whereas wilful maladjustment begun 
here and logically projected into the hereafter 
if conscious identity is to persist augurs a hotter 
hell than Dante or Jonathan Edwards ever im- 
agined. 


Thirty-seven 





SCRIPT URAL 
MODERNISM 





IV 


F MODERNISM should ever attempt to 
JL displace or destroy the Bible it would tac- 

itly make all needful preparation for its 
own obsequies. With equal wisdom a loco- 
motive engineer would engage in a conspiracy 
to undermine the mighty bridge upon which 
his train was expected to cross a mountain 
gorge. The present state of nervous tension 
among nearly all classes of passengers bound 
for the promised land is due chiefly to the ap- 
prehension that the few Modernists on board 
entertain overt designs upon the celestial 
causeway, while the latter group assert merely 
that their fellow-travelers insist upon making 
a permanent sojourn thereupon, instead of 
passing onward to the sweet fields beyond the 
swelling flood. 

Almost any constructive Modernist would 
assent cheerfully to the dictum propounded in 
the opening sentence of the Epistle to the He- 
_ brews—the one and only explicit and compre- 
hensive statement of the character and scope 
of divine revelation to be found in all the 
scriptures—that God, having of old time 
spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by 
divers portions and in divers manners, has at 
the end of these days spoken unto us through 
his Son. As a graphic delineation of the pro- 


Forty-one 


Constructive Modernism 


cess of partial and progressive revelation un- 
der widely diverse conditions—the measure of 
the revelation being limited always and only by 
the receptivity of the human agent—culminat- 
ing in the perfect revelation of Jesus Christ, 
made possible by his perfect receptivity and 
responsiveness, this passage would be very 
dificult of improvement. 

Viewed simply and sympathetically as a 
trustworthy record of the spiritual experiences 
of those who have sought and found God more 
truly than any others have done, and to whom 
God revealed himself in the fullest measure 
of their knowledge and capability, subject also 
to all their existing limitations of every de- 
scription, the Bible is beyond all comparison 
the most priceless volume in the possession of 
the race—a treasure-trove of truth without 
which we would soon revert to spiritual pau- 
perism. It is therefore deserving of the most 
undivided attention and vigorous thinking 
which we can bestow upon it, with no place, 
however, for the false valuation and ignorant 
veneration so generally elicited, whether 
through devious design or mere intellectual in- 
ertia. 

In addition to declaring the loftiest spirit- 
ual principles mankind has ever known, and 


Forty-two 


Scriptural Modernism 


illustrating the manner of their operation in 
the pulsing life of those sanguine souls who 
now aspired and now yielded to insidious 
temptation, walking sometimes in the gorge 
of gloom and anon upon the heaven-kissing 
hills—apart from exhibiting all this with an 
artlessness beyond art and a convincingness 
that forestalls attempted proof, the Bible em- 
bodies in many portions direct revelations of 
the essential nature of God and man of which 
no more than the faintest intimations have ever 
come through any other medium of history 
or literature. At its very threshold, in the gray 
morning light of history, we are startled by 
the audacious announcement of the inherent 
kinship and spiritual likeness of the human 
and the divine. A millennium afterward, in 
the midst of the earlier dispensation, we find 
the depicture of man as made but little lower 
than God—not the angels, as erroneously 
translated—and crowned with glory and 
honor. At the consummation we look upon 
Jesus exalting the unspoiled humanness of 
childhood as the fittest earthly type of heavenly- 
mindedness, and in answer to the charge of 
blasphemy declaring (John 10:34) the es- 
sential divinity of humanity. Throughout the 
greater portion of the scriptures the dominant 


Forty-three 


Constructive Modernism 


motivation is that men shall make actual and 
present their potentially divine sonship. A 
more inspired or inspiring summons could not 
be conceived, and to suppose either that it 
shall be outgrown or shall ever fail to awaken 
the ardent enthusiasm of nobler souls is about 
equally gratuitous and absurd. 

Revelation emerges even more clearly in the 
reading of the scriptures than in the writing, 
upon a principle somewhat analogous to that 
which identifies the phenomena of sight and 
sound not with the agency from which they 
appear to proceed, but with the eye and ear 
that function in response to the respective 
stimuli. If the tenets of faith be conceived as 
once for all delivered unto the saints now de- 
ceased, it was for the express purpose of being 
apprehended increasingly by those coming af- 
ter them. Revelation is degraded if it be un- 
derstood as anything less than deep calling 
unto deep—the actually infinite communica- 
ting itself to the potentially infinite. 

It is no less true now than when written 
nearly twenty centuries ago that the letter of 
the scripture kills and the spirit of the scrip- 
ture imparts spiritual life. Given to men as 
a clue to guide them through the labyrinthine 
maze of ignorance and immaturity to fuller 


Forty-four 


Scriptural Modernism 


knowledge and larger liberty, the same scrip- 
tures are capable of being made, and in fact 
are more often than otherwise made, a bond 
which fetters the spirit in darkness. One 
might even encounter, some difficulty in dif- 
ferentiating between the present excessive ven- 
eration of our spiritual forefathers, the usually 
holy men of old through whom God spoke in 
the divers portions and manners aforemen- 
tioned, and the veneration of physical ances- 
tors which stamps the Chinese people as pa- 
gans. 

The quest of God in the Bible is a subtle 
form of idolatry; the quest of God through 
and beyond the medium of the experiences of 
other men as reliably recorded in the Bible is 
at once reasonable and scientific, provided we 
observe the same reactions in ourselves as they 
report having found. It follows that their 
chief if not sole value for us is in their like- 
ness rather than their unlikeness to ourselves. 
This is pre-eminently true of Jesus Christ, 
though the emphasis has been shifted all but 
invariably to the superhuman valuations of his 
personality, despite his favorite and habitual 
characterization of himself as the son of man, 
which would plainly appear to anticipate and 
counteract this very tendency. 


Forty-five 


Constructive Modernism 


Concerning the future appraisal of the Bible 
and estimate of its authority by the construc- 
tive Modernist a few trenchant statements 
may be made, without present opportunity to 
discuss or defend them: 

He will rely implicitly upon those teachings 
which can be verified in his own experience, 
and no other. 

He will staunchly refrain from accepting 
as true anything therein which he would feel 
compelled to reject elsewhere. 

He will steadfastly believe that God is just 
as ready to reveal himself to his waiting chil- 
dren as he has ever been; that the only con- 
clusive evidence of his having ever spoken to 
men is that he still speaks to them; that the 
word of God to the individual is final for the 
individual. 


Forty-six 


CHRISTIAN 
MODERNISM 


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V 


VENTUALLY Modernism will stand 
G and would fall with Jesus Christ. The 
speediest and surest method of deter- 
mining its own destiny is to stake everything 
upon him—not upon his deity, which, however 
true, is a metaphysical abstraction eluding 
finite grasp and defying even definition; nor 
upon his mysterious control of the forces of 
nature, which is about equally a help and a 
hindrance to understanding his character and 
mission—but instead upon the perfection of 
the personality of Jesus himself, who becomes 
to us immeasurably more than prodigy or sign; 
who makes all other recorded miracles credible 
but trivial; who, bearing his own witness with- 
in the soul, imparting the benediction of his 
own present blessedness and the perennial 
power of triumphant living, throws all hearsay 
evidence out of court as incompetent, irrele- 
vant and immaterial. 

Traditionalists, miscalling themselves Funda- 
mentalists, despite their fine facility in missing 
all the final fundamentals, through the centu- 
ries have made the momentously melancholy 
blunder of resting their cause upon external 
evidences—more specifically the infallibility of 
the scriptures and the authority of the Church, 
each in turn representing a progressive de- 


Forty-nine 


Constructive Modernism 


clension from the proper plane of spiritual 
certitude. 

Upon the former point it may be confidently 
asserted that their emphasis is as obviously 
wrenched as their fears are fatuous. The 
foundations that rest upon sand cannot be 
stabilized by their most frantic efforts, and 
those that rest upon the rock stand in no need 
of their puny props. The truths and values 
that are as a city set upon a hill can not be 
hidden and exclude exploitation. Much as 
a gigantic redwood towers above a scrub-oak 
thicket, the essential truths are superior to their 
incidental setting, and most of all the incar- 
nate Truth overtops the four fragmentary nar- 
ratives of that marvelous career which have 
come down to us from uncertain sources, as 
copies of other lost copies, translations of trans- 
lations, spoken in one language, written in an- 
other and read in still others, without ante- 
cedent, date, signature or other authentication 
than the altogether unique character of their 
contents, which of itself alone validates the 
first three, at least. There is the added evi- 
dence of the labors and the letters of Saint 
Paul, which have of their own virility disarmed 
criticism and disbelief, though with no warrant 


Fifty 


Christian Modernism 


for the extravagant veneration which at Lystra 
the Apostle himself so vehemently disavowed. 

Reposing upon no such flimsy foundation, 
but providentially placed beyond the reach of 
chance and change, the claims of Christianity 
are supported by two distinct, credible and 
converging lines of testimony which may be 
confidently counted upon to defy any future 
critical or scientific impeachment: First, their 
historical background, involving the necessity 
of conceding and the psychological absurdity 
of denying that Jesus Christ and Saul of Tar- 
sus, to mention no others, are more surely his- 
torical personages than Oliver Cromwell and 
George Washington; second, their abiding 
power, in that the outstanding principles then 
proclaimed and applied, with their attendant 
phenomena, have been and may be abundantly 
verified in every generation down to the pres- 
ent, and by each and every individual who 
will test them fairly, with less of room for 
error and smaller need of conjecture than any 
known or suspected physical facts. 

With reference to the Church as the sup- 
posed dispenser of gifts and graces, as it has 
been and is now in contrast with what it was 
designed and empowered to be, one who is in 
the most cordial sympathy with its proper 


Fifty-one 


Constructive Modernism 


work must needs speak in words of deeper 
sorrow than the wail above the dead. Having 
definitely shifted, almost before the fires of 
Pentecost ceased to burn, from the realm of 
the spiritual to that of the formal, with noth- 
ing more than rare sporadic efforts to regain 
its lost glory, the Church has long been and is 
now a congeries of contradictions, collectively 
incapable of receiving or utilizing any endow- 
ment of consequence, yet comprising in its 
individual aspects about all that is worth while 
in the sphere of human betterment. With its 
ludicrous and pernicious conception, traceable 
to priestly influences, of two different classes 
of adherents, represented respectively by the 
ministry and laity, one active and the other 
passive, with different stages and standards of 
morality—all this in sharp contrast with the 
clear individual summons of Jesus, himself a 
layman, to seek the kingdom of God before 
all else—it is truly a spectacle to make angels 
weep and disbelievers blaspheme. And now, 
the very heathen, wiser in their generation 
than the children of light, have begun to draw 
the clear and unmistakable distinction between 
Christianity and Christ which his professed 
followers have so stupidly and purposely ig- 
nored. 


Fifty-two. 


Christian Modernism 


Changeless in the midst of change, above 
fetid fog and moral miasma and all the more 
transcendent because of them, the commanding 
and spiritually irresistible figure of Jesus Christ 
is emerging to the view of myriad eyes long 
beclouded and peering wistfully for fuller un- 
veiling. And in him the two indicated de- 
mands of constructive Modernism are ade- 
quately and abundantly met. 

Jesus Christ incarnates reality. No act or 
gesture or word of intimation of the artificial 
or theatrical in any degree attaches to his per- 
sonality. He faced the physical facts of suf- 
fering and death with never a denial of their 
verity but instead an assertion and demon- 
stration of other facts which embraced and 
overreached them. In dealing with spiritual 
problems, where theology has been always most 
deviously confusing he was most crystal clear. 
Sin and selfishness were realities, but goodness 
and sacrificial love had power to overcome 
them. Mankind in general and the punctil- 
ious churchmen of his day in particular were 
lost as sheep not having a shepherd, though 
not “lost” in the distorted significance of Tra- 
ditionalism; he pitied them and pointed out the 
plain path which a wayfaring man though a 
fool need never miss. 


Fifty-three 


Constructive Modernism 


Of his exemplification of the quality of 
rightness it would appear all but impertinent 
to speak. His critics and detractors have 
searched as vainly as diligently for any flaw 
or foible, and his earnest followers have found 
riches of joy unfathomable. To walk with 
him, even stumblingly, is to walk away from 
sin and selfishness. To become like him is ul- 
timate attainment, for the measure of any vir- 
tue is its Christlikeness. To gain his earthly 
point of view is to achieve triumph out of 
tragedy, peace out of pain, sight out of blind- 
ness and purity out of a stain. To catch the 
resplendent sublimity of his calm survey of the 
eternal is to know and share the power of the 
endless life. 

Constructive Modernism—and with it the 
Eventual Church—has before it the one defin- 
ite task of apprehending and exemplifying 
more truly the spirit of Jesus Christ than has 
been done before. So only will it serve God 
in service to his other children. 


Fifty-four 








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